Category Archives: Legacy of the Void (LotV)

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Spawning Tool has been around for years. It has seen its ups and downs, but never have we seen the activity we saw right after the LotV launch. Our plan to prepare for the launch was to get the build orders feature launched and try to market it as much as possible. The expectations was that the site views would go up by a pretty decent amount, because people need build orders!

These days it can be hard to find build orders. Many of the sites that posted quality builds, stopped mid HotS. This left a niche open for us to jump into! Apparently we did something right!

After the LotV launch, we saw a HUGE jump in views.

When we got this info, we were happy that the preparation paid off. We were glad to see that despite all the talk of the decline of StarCraft and no one laddering, there was clearly a huge interest in build orders and replays.

Here are some more stats that we have gathered!

This is a very promising sign to see. The fact that more than half of our views are from people that have already used the site before leads us to think that we are doing our jobs well. People would not come back to a site if they did not see any improvement value in it.

One thing we have been really hyped about is the amount of people on the site throughout the day. As I am writing this post, it is 6am EST. The site has been averaging from 20-40 active viewers every time that I have checked since the launch.

Build wise, there are many people posting, viewing, and getting involved. There can never be enough StarCraft content though! If any of you have a cool build or idea, you’re welcome to add your builds. Or if you just want to learn a new build, just come by to study up (and vote and comment while you’re at it). We are very open to getting new people to help out if they are interested.

Overall, thanks to all the content creators and build posters that have gotten involved already. You guys made this entire plan possible! We want to continue this and are excited for the future of Spawning Tool and StarCraft :).

You might be wondering: what type of all-in starts with economic cheese? The type that wants to have a sustained attack as soon as possible, that’s what.

In this game, Snute cuts corners and goes for almost pure Drones for the first 4 minutes of the game. This allows him to get up to 6 Extractors and spread Drones across 3 mineral lines before he lines up his attack. From there, he streams Roaches and Ravagers across the map to bust down walls and forcefields to force his way into the Protoss base.

On the flipside, State played it safe opening Gateway first, then getting his Nexus afterwards. WIth a quick +1 attack, he also gets his 3rd base quickly after scouting Snute’s greedy build, and then into Blink.

When the Ravagers attack, State already has his simcity in place with Gateways clogging up the entry into his 3rd base, so despite being down at times 70 to 15 army supply, Snute has difficulty finding space to push in. State continues to build pylons to power his Gateways and for the Overcharge.

With Blink up, though, State makes a great hold: his 3 base economy (with more Probes than Snute has Drones) allows him to slowly get back into the game while Snute’s slow Roaches walk across the map. The battle continues on for minutes, but State keeps his 3rd base alive and evens the supply count. When the pressure begins to lighten, State is able to push for a 4th base as his minerals begin to run out his in main. When the supplys even up, he traps Snute’s army and pushes across for the win.

Most upvoted build order: MorDka

MorDka shared his 2base immortal adept all-in as a new way for Protoss players to remind Zerg players what WoL felt like. You can read up on how it works, follow the build order, run the real-time build order, read the analysis and watch replays about how it works. Here are a few thoughts from the creator:

1. How are you liking the LotV beta so far?

Legacy of the Void is a lot of fun and frustrations since it’s so different than HotS. The game allows for more comebacks with the new units and the stronger defenders advantage. The fast pace of the game makes it more stressfull especially for lower level players and that’s why archon mode is so good, I really enjoy it.

2. How well is the build working on the ladder?

Well… Actually after the newest patch the build doesn’t work so well. Slowing down the warp in time made the warp prism way more vulnerable to corrosive bile and the adept nerf made the build quite a bit weaker but i think that it’s still viable on master level.

3. What builds are your opponents using that are giving you the most trouble?

The game has a bigger defenders advantage right now so there aren’t any specific build orders that i have trouble with. It’s usually a specific new unit that causes the troubles. For example Liberators or Lurkers.

Of course, LotV isn’t coming out for another month, but we actually just saw our LotV beat HotS in our google analytics data, so it seems that the tide is turning, and we want to make sure that the most useful data is available easily. We will, for the foreseeable future, continue to keep our HotS site online, but especially with the replay format changes, those replays just aren’t so useful anymore.

One question we have had a few times is why we split the sites. The primary reason is because the data is very different, and we had to have separate logic for both of them. Specifically, the unit types and game speed actually require different backends in place. Because of that, we felt that the data was altogether incompatible, so keeping them together would just muddle up statistics.

As for why you don’t share you user account between the two? That’s mostly laziness. The 2 sites are on different databases, and I didn’t put forth the effort to sync up the authentication between them.

These histograms show the research time for various upgrades in Legacy of the Void. The data comes from ~2200 replays uploaded to http://lotv.spawningtool.comof all levels of play from the beginning of beta. About 25% of games are from professional tournaments. The same includes about 1500 Zerg replays, 1200 Protoss replays, and 1000 Terran replays.

The graphs are bucketed by LotV (real-time) seconds. In some cases, extreme outliers to the right have been removed from the data for a better visualization. Note that the Warp Gate timings may not be exactly right while Blizzard tweaks with the exact impact of Chronoboost, but it should still be very close.

Let us know if there’s anything else you want to see from our data. We will try to see what we can do, but in the mean time, play around with the research tool to see what you can find yourself! http://lotv.spawningtool.com/research/winrates/

Also, if you could help us make the data as accurate as possible by uploading your replays, that would be amazing!

I saw this build on /r/allthingsterran. /u/Bakemonoda had posted a video on the build where he explains the build. He was more than willing to upload the replay and let me do a write up on it for a build of the week, so thanks to him for that.

Basically this build puts the pressure on the protoss before they can get a warp prism out, then the cyclones can deal with the warp prisms after it’s out :D. The protoss opens standard, but this build still does a good amount of damage/game ending damage.

The goal is to do some damage with the proxy reaper, then follow up with cyclones to finish off the game/put yourself in a game winning position.

The proxy reaper is extremely effective in LotV right now. The reapers arrive before a mothership core is out (on a two base protoss opening) and they can do big damage by kiting around the adepts/stalkers. The bombs also disrupt mining/give extra kills.

By the time that the mothership core can get out (if the protoss decides to make it), there will be a cyclone to target it down. After the third reaper, you can also lift the barracks and float it at a ramp/cliff, for the cyclones, so they can have vision and target stalkers/adepts on top of the ramp. This takes away most of the defenders advantage that the protoss would normally have with terrain.

Reapers also can give vision by jumping up on the cliffs/suiciding up ramps to give vision.

Using the reaper bombs to keep the stalkers/adepts from attacking is also another strong thing that you can do to keep the cyclones from taking damage. The reapers are only there to distract/tank for the cyclones. The fact that both of the units in this cheese have high speed makes it hard for the protoss to deal with. The only thing that they can really do is try to save the MSC to photon overcharge some or use the adept ability really well to counter the speed of the terran units.

The latter is the best of the two in my opinion, because photon overcharge only last like 11 seconds as of the last patch.

The followup for the build is just getting another CC and another factory (if you want to go mech). If you want to go bio, I would reccomend floating the barracks back home, switching it with the factory after about 3 cyclones, and starting stim right away, along with more barracks.

Over the past few years, Spawning Tool has grown a ton. Thanks to tournaments organizers and casual players, we have accumulated over 30,000 StarCraft 2 replays with 13 million build steps and 400,000 tags. Although the site can generate interesting statistics and predictions from the data, it can be daunting for players to find strategies to actually use in-game. You have to dig through hundreds of replays and hope to find a good, clean build order. We wanted to make that easier, so we’re releasing Spawning Tool Build Orders.

I chose this build for a replay of the week because of the similarities it shows to Heart of the Swarm. The only main changes are what you can afford and when. Also, in Legacy of the Void, CC First is a much more viable build because of how fast you can get the command center down, compared to the rush distance on maps. The economy change made it so every race can get down buildings and expansions faster, but the time it takes for a unit to go across the map still stays the same, making greedy builds more viable in this new expansion.

Legacy has been pushing towards a more micro and agression based play. With all of the changes, it is harder to get maxed because of how fast your enemy attacks or you attack. Also, in my opinion, upgrades matter even more because turtling is harder to do.

This build starts off with a CC First into a quick 3-rax play. The point of the build is to try to get +1 attack, stim, combat shield, two medivacs, and 16 marines out as fast as possible. When you get these units, you have a ton of utility on the map to do one big attack, multi-prong attack them in their 3rd and main, or just force units out of them. After the starport goes down, I add a quick 4th and 5th barracks to create a strong followup push. This makes the build very all in. It is very hard to transition when you are constantly building out of 5 rax, a factory, and a starport. The amount of units that come for the followup push make up for this though.

One important thing is to stop producing SCVs once you get two base saturation and 3 gases.

Again, this is a very micro oriented build. Misclicks lose games with builds like this. I managed to get lucky and snipe his morphing banelings this game, but if they had formed, I would have split, picked up, and then kept on with the multipronged attacking!

Part of learning a new meta-game is learning new cheese strategies, and the 4 Gate Adept build popularized by Geiko is a pretty strong Protoss cheese, so here is our first Legacy of the Void (LotV) Protoss build order.

The basic gist of the strategy is to abuse the mobility and tankiness of Adepts. With the Shield Upgrade from the Twilight Council, Adepts have 90 Health and 140 Shields (and 1 armor). Although they have relatively low DPS because of a slow attack speed, their bonus damage against light units allows them to 2-shot workers, Combat Shield-less Marines, and Zerglings.

Above all that, they also have the Psionic Transfer ability to create a shade to bypass static defenses and attack in 2 locations at once. You can also cancel the shade so that Adepts can effectively threaten the main and natural bases simultaneously, forcing the defender to split up or be left completely defenseless.

The build itself is relatively straightforward, and Geiko provides a good explanation in the TL thread: open 2 Gate to harass. Get your Twilight Council for the Shield Upgrade and 2 more Gateways and place a proxy Pylon to start wailing on your opponent. With the Twilight Council, you also have the flexibility to mix in DTs, just to make their lives even more difficult.

This particular game against ViBE shows how strong this build is against Zerg. Going down the list of potential defenses,

Zerglings die in 2 shots

Queens aren’t numerous enough

Spine Crawlers can be bypassed

Roaches aren’t fast enough and actually have less HP/Shields than an upgraded Adept

Although ViBE defends well against the initial 2 Adept poke and even the first warp-in, the next wave of Mass Adepts (still off of 1 base) is too much to handle, even with burrowed Roaches.

So far, the metagame in the Legacy of the Void beta has been hard to decipher while players are still figuring out the game. Openings are definitely inspired by existing builds, but exact timings and supply counts don’t match. Compositions from then on out are a mish-mash of all units with multiple pivots in-between. It has been really inspiring to see how players are using new units.

As I was going through LotV replays on Spawning Tool, however, I noticed that Nathanias has done new things with old units in reviving a version of the old iEchoic build from Wings of Liberty TvT. The exact build is not too important, but looking at the build order, the important thing is that he starts with Hellions and Banshees, then transitions into Hellions and Battlecruisers. That’s basically the idea.

The build worked in TvT with the basic assumption that there are 3 units that Terran have to counter air: Marines, Thors, and Vikings. At the time, Thors didn’t have the High Impact Payload, so with enough armor on Battlecruisers, neither Thors nor Marines could really handle them, except in very large numbers. Large numbers of Marines get roasted by blue flame Hellions, and Vikings can be countered by more Vikings, and hence, air superiority wins. And all of this can be achieved on a few Factories and Starports by moving add-ons back and forth.

In modern TvZ, Zerg has Queens, Hydralisks, Mutalisks, Corruptors, and Viper’s Parasitic Bomb. To be totally honest, I have no idea why this build should work. I guess standard ZvT is Muta-Ling-Bane. The only meaningful change as part of LotV that I can think of is the Tactical Jump, which would seem to help a lot.

Sorry for not providing more insight on this build, but I don’t have a VOD link, and I can’t watch the replays. Even so, hopefully there are more of you out there who are just as excited as I was to see this build come back. Let me know how this works for you in the beta!